I had a conversation with Rachel Higham recently on Whatever Next? Unplugged and it got me thinking about The Human Gap. It helped me name something I’ve been circling around for a while and hadn’t quite landed on.

We all know about technical debt. It’s one of the most familiar phrases in any IT transformation conversation. Legacy systems, fragmented platforms, decisions made twenty years ago that we’re still paying for today. Boards understand it, or at least they understand the cost of it. It appears on roadmaps and business cases and risk registers. It has a label, a language, and in most organisations, a budget line.

But what about the other debt? The one that doesn’t appear on the risk register?

Rachel called the gap between IT and the business a chasm. Not a gap. A chasm. And as she described it, I realised she wasn’t talking about systems. She was talking about decades of separation. Technology teams physically relocated away from the organisations they serve. Outsourcing and offshoring that prioritised efficiency over connection. Platform consolidation that standardised processes but quietly removed the relationships that used to sit around them.

That chasm has a name. It’s the human gap: the distance between the plan and what people actually believe, experience and do.

I remember it myself. Early in my career, we were bespokely developing applications alongside the business. We understood how the work actually worked because we were in it, sitting with the people doing it. Over time, wave after wave of IT transformation took that closeness away. We called it modernisation. We called it efficiency. We called it best practice. But what we were also doing, without naming it, was building up a different kind of debt entirely.

Human debt.

The accumulated cost of years of designing technology without deep connection to the people it serves. The cost of treating IT as a back-office function, a cost centre, an infrastructure provider, rather than a shaper of human experience. The cost of assuming that if the platform works, the job is done.

And here’s what concerns me most. We are about to enter the most significant wave of technological change many of us will experience in our careers. AI is not just another platform. It is a fundamental shift in how work gets done, how decisions are made, how organisations operate. Boards are talking about it. They’re talking about the technical layers, the governance, the integrity, the risk. All of which matters.

But is anyone asking what it’s really for? And who it’s really for? And what happens to the people whose working lives it’s about to reshape?

Rachel made a pertinent point:-

Human-centred design is the only thing that will stop agentic AI from becoming technically impressive but socially unliveable.

That’s not a soft statement. That’s a warning. If we deploy AI the same way we deployed every other wave of technology, technically first, humanly later, we will not just repeat the same mistakes. We will accelerate them.

AI doesn’t just automate tasks. It automates assumptions. Every workflow we hand to an agent is a decision about where judgement sits. Every model we train encodes beliefs about what matters. If those beliefs are shaped without the lived experience of the people affected, we are not reducing human debt. We are compounding it.

And the conditions right now are not favourable. The political and economic climate is pushing organisations toward cost reduction, lean operations, tighter governance. Those instincts are understandable. But they carry a familiar pattern. When pressure builds, the human side gets cut first. The service designers. The experience researchers. The people whose job it is to ask how does this actually feel?

Rachel described it perfectly. The structures that snap back into place under pressure are legacy governance that prioritises predictability over learning, funding models that reward output over outcome, and delivery pressures that leave no space for reflection or empathy. The rhetoric stays warm. The organisation stays cold.

I worry that we are heading into the AI era carrying human debt we haven’t even acknowledged, let alone started to repay. The chasm Rachel described hasn’t closed. In many organisations it has widened. And now we’re asking people to trust AI-driven decisions when they don’t yet trust that their own experience of technology has been heard.

Human debt will only reduce if organisations genuinely commit to being human-centred. Not as a label. Not as a methodology bolted onto the side of a programme. But as a stance. A belief that technology is at its best when it honours the people it touches.

That means bringing multicultural, multidisciplinary, and multigenerational voices into the conversation. Not after the architecture is drawn. Not after the business case is signed. At the beginning.

Rachel challenged even the assumption that younger, digitally native employees will naturally bridge this gap. Consuming technology is not the same as understanding it. High usage does not equal high sophistication. If we’re not human-centred in how we bring the next generation into this work, we’re just repeating the pattern.

The fear I carry is this. The focus will remain technical. The financial pressures will lead to more cutbacks on the human side. AI will accelerate without the human due diligence it demands. And the human debt we create will be larger than the one we carry today.

We talk endlessly about closing technical debt. Perhaps it’s time we started talking about the debt that sits underneath it. The one that no dashboard measures. The one that shows up in disconnection, distrust, and the quiet feeling that technology is something that happens to people rather than something that works for them.

That’s human debt.

And until we name it, we can’t begin to repay it.

Whatever next?

Hear the full conversation with Rachel Higham on Whatever Next? Unplugged: